Retired 2/8/02 as a Software Engineer specializing in flight software for
orbiting radar systems. Turned several CPUs onto SETI search in the
background while I work on more earthly tasks: digital music synthesis.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
The odds are that life has developed elsewhere in the universe. I do not think
that present Earth-based techniques stand a very high possibility of finding
it, considering that most of the signals we hear are _very_ old and we are
looking at only a small portion of the sky. I think a first step for us at
present is to launch a series of high-reliability beacon satellites with long-
lasting power sources in several different directions but basically toward the
center of the universe, to signal our presence and our general location.
Getting both sides of a potential future contact looking for each other
greatly increases the possibility of success.
I run SETI@home to help stimulate interest in outward-looking efforts, and to
help provide necessary resources to a task no government would fund with such
speculative chances for success
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
